Do you remember tail-gunner Joe McCarthy? Howard Zinn did. In his textbook on American history, Zinn devoted more pages to McCarthy than he did to Thomas Alva Edison. The reason? Why, it was because for ultra-liberals such as Zinn, McCarthy was the essence of conservative evil.

McCarthy was not a very attractive figure. The Wisconsin senator wore a perpetually creepy smirk and when he spoke, did so in a high pitched voice punctuated by nervous cackles. Yet it was what he did that made him infamous.

During the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, McCarthy spearheaded a witch hunt for communist sympathizers in the government. He would appear before television cameras waving a piece of paper and declaring, “I have a list.” The list was phony, but it was sufficient to put the fear of exposure into many innocent hearts.

One of them was my uncle, Milton. During the 1930s, as a teenager, he attended several Communist Party meetings. Then he went off to war to serve in Patton’s army. Once back home, having few technical skills, he sought a job as a bus driver for the city of New York.

The question was, would he be hired if his past became known? He and the larger family therefore worried on his behalf. As it happened, he was hired and remained on the job for decades. Nonetheless, others had their careers ruined by the McCarthyism scare.

Flash forward to today. The very liberals who denounced McCarthy’s tactics have adopted them as their own. They have taken to vilifying their enemies on little or no evidence. They have even taken to getting people fired from their jobs if they disagree with liberal dogma.

Just ask Brendan Eich. He is the man who had to resign as CEO of Mozilla because liberals revealed he donated money to support the California proposition in favor of traditional marriage. Likewise, just ask the Koch brothers, who are routinely flogged on the floor of the Senate by majority leader Harry Reid.

Reid calls the Kochs un-American, just the way McCarthy called his targets un-American. Because they funded causes other than the ones he prefers, they are condemned as trying to take over the country. Even Condoleezza Rice, a former Secretary of State, was attacked for having supported the Iraq war and therefore is deemed unfit to sit on corporate boards.

The difference between the old McCarthyism and the new? Why, McCarthy was one man. For several years, he made a big stir, but then he was brought down by a coalition of Americans who could not bear to see him undermine the fabric of American freedoms.

This partnership included liberals such as CBS’s Edward R. Murrow, but also conservatives such as President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ultimately asked by counsel Joseph N. Welch at the Army-McCarthy hearings “Have you no sense of decency?” McCarthy could not muster an answer.

Today’s liberals, when asked the same thing, do not even attempt an answer. They have no shame because they are convinced of their personal rectitude. Still living in a time warp where they conceive of themselves as the victims of a McCarthy, they cannot imagine they are now the victimizers.

And so Harry Reid can accuse Mitt Romney of not having paid his taxes, without providing a scrap of evidence. Or Barack Obama can accuse Republicans of engaging in a war on women by citing a false statistic about how women supposedly earn 77 cents on the dollar for the same work compared to men.

Even when these contemporary McCarthys are called out for their mendacity, they stand tall because they know they have legions of equally corrupt liberals at their back. They are confident that the media will not assail them the way they did McCarthy. Nor will academics expose their shabby politics.

Worse still, voters keep voting for these genuinely anti-American miscreants. As a result, they keep doing what works for them.

Melvyn L. Fein Ph.D. is professor of sociology at Kennesaw State University.

Yes, those poor, helpless Koch brothers only sold oil equipment to terrorist-loving, Israel-hating Iran in violation of international sanctions. Two minutes of research would have revealed this to Fein.

From Bloomberg:

A Bloomberg Markets investigation has found that Koch Industries -- in addition to being involved in improper payments to win business in Africa, India and the Middle East -- has sold millions of dollars of petrochemical equipment to Iran, a country the U.S. identifies as a sponsor of global terrorism.

Internal company documents show that the company made those sales through foreign subsidiaries, thwarting a U.S. trade ban. Koch Industries units have also rigged prices with competitors, lied to regulators and repeatedly run afoul of environmental regulations, resulting in five criminal convictions since 1999 in the U.S. and Canada.

From 1999 through 2003, Koch Industries was assessed more than $400 million in fines, penalties and judgments. In December 1999, a civil jury found that Koch Industries had taken oil it didn’t pay for from federal land by mismeasuring the amount of crude it was extracting. Koch paid a $25 million settlement to the U.S.

Phil Dubose, a Koch employee who testified against the company said he and his colleagues were shown by their managers how to steal and cheat -- using techniques they called the Koch Method.

Women make the same as men depends on how you twist your statistics. I suggest you ask women whether they are paid equally to men. Romney could have easily put to rest his tax returns by making them available the same way every other Presidential candidate has done. He chose not to for the same reason John McCain chose Sarah Palin over him in 2008.

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